Harbor Nocturne

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Charlie Gilford turned to Sophie and Marius and said, “No medical treatment needed. She’s all right. And there’s been no crime here. It’s all code four. You can go back out and clear.”

  As a farewell to Ace and Sadie, Charlie extended his arms, palms up, in a theatrical gesture and said to them, “You live in the land of dreams. This is Hollywood. Don’t ever let the music stop playing.”

  “Bye-bye, Detective Gilford!” Ace called, beaming. Then he whispered to Sadie and they sang to him in unison, “‘And the beat goes on! The beat goes onnnnn!’”

  “Sonny and Cher would be proud!” Compassionate Charlie Gilford responded with a flourish, before descending the reeking staircase.

  When Sophie and Marius were back in their shop and had cleared for calls, Sophie said, “Marius, are you in the mood for pizza?”

  “I am always in the mood,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I think we just iced the Hollywood Love Story Award. We caught one that nobody’s gonna beat.”

  Dinko Babich had decided to take Lita Medina for a late lunch in San Pedro before the dreaded meeting at his mother’s house. First he wanted to sit with her and talk more, and look at her, and try to think what he was going to do to help her. What could he do? Then he thought he could do what Croatians always do with a guest. He could feed her, that’s what. He bought some sandwiches and a bottle of screw-top wine from the Italian deli and drove to Point Fermin Park.

  They sat on the grass for two hours, she talking about her life in Mexico, glossing over the last few years spent working at the awful cantina in Guanajuato.

  When it came to those years she said, “I do not wish to say to you how I live when I work at that place. It was very bad.”

  “You don’t have to talk about that,” Dinko said. “Not to me. Not ever.” He wondered at his choice of the word “ever.” Wasn’t this the last time he’d ever see her?

  “I am ashame,” she said.

  “Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it,” he said. “You done what you had to do in the crummy world you were born into.”

  She said, “We wait one year for my father to come home, but he never come. He went with the coyotes to cross the border for work and we never hear nothing more.”

  “What month was it when he made the crossing?”

  “Agosto.”

  “That’s a dangerous time,” Dinko said. “A lotta migrants die of heat stroke.”

  “Me, I cross at Easter time,” she said. “There was rain, but was okay. I pray to Santa María. The coyote is not a bad man, but I have to pay to him much of my money I save from the cantina.”

  “And you ended up dancing where I found you.”

  “Jes,” she said, and he smiled at her pronunciation.

  “It’s not jes,” he said. “It’s yes. Y-y-yes.”

  “Y-y-yes,” she said, and they both laughed.

  When it was his turn, he talked about working on the docks and living in Pedro all his life, so close to the big ocean.

  Then Lita heard what she thought was a woman shrieking in terror. “What is that?” she cried.

  Dinko laughed and said, “It’s just a South Shores peacock. They’re protected and feral. Nobody owns them. They’ll walk up to your car and look at their reflection on the side of it and start pecking the hell out of your paint job. One musta wandered down here to the cliffs.”

  Lita turned and watched the colorful bird strutting across the lawn in the direction of the sidewalk, where a child had thrown cracker crumbs on the grass.

  She laughed and said to him, “San Pedro is a beautiful place to live, Dinko.”

  “You think so?”

  “Jes—I mean, yes. Very beautiful.”

  He peered out at the ocean. “Maybe you’re right. When I see it through someone else’s eyes.” Then he looked at her and said, “Somebody else’s lovely eyes.”

  She lowered her gaze and said, “You are lucky man to be in this place. I wish I do not have to go away to Hollywood. But I must. Is only way for me.”

  Time had never passed faster for Dinko Babich than it did that afternoon, as they looked out at the calm Pacific and at Catalina Island, which always seemed so deceptively close when the weather was clear. It felt as though Santa Catalina were a haven, a prize, something out there virtually within reach, but so far beyond them. They sat silently, content to gaze at the horizon with youthful daydreams, forgetting the threats from the real world around them.

  When Dinko realized it was time to leave, he came to an inescapable understanding of his dilemma. He had a young girl with him who was a virtual stranger, with all she owned in the world in the back of his Jeep. And he was suspended from his job as a longshoreman with his checking account running dry, and his Croatian mother was going to crap a crucifix when he walked into the house with Lita. And yet . . . every time he looked into her upward-tilted, heavily lashed amber eyes, his heart started dancing and he couldn’t focus on the hazardous burden he’d voluntarily shouldered. If he could be logical for a few minutes, he could think again that she was just a Mexican whore. And yet he could not be logical, not when looking directly at her, and listening to the soft lilt of her accented English.

  As the end of their second hour together grew near he said, “Lita, we gotta go and face my mother.”

  * * *

  Brigita Babich seemed confused, more than anything else, when Dinko entered the house at twilight and said, “Mom, this is Lita Medina. She’s a friend who needs a place to stay tonight. I told her we’d help her.”

  The three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom home on the hill west of Gaffey was comfortable and solid, as befitting a crane operator like Jan Babich, who’d made a handsome living during his thirty-five years on the docks prior to his untimely death at the age of fifty-nine. The house had a red tile roof and white stucco walls, and had been worth nearly a hundred thousand more during the housing boom than it was now. There was a large family room where Dinko and his late father had played pool and video games. Although the living room’s overstuffed furniture was getting old, it had been costly in its day and was still comfortable and solid, like the house itself.

  Every veteran crane operator in San Pedro might’ve had a house as substantial as the Babich home, but to Lita Medina it was a grand mansion, easily the finest house she had ever entered in her life.

  Lita said to Brigita Babich, “I am very honor to meet with you, señora. I am sorry to be a problem.”

  “Yes, nice to meet you, too,” Brigita Babich said, without offering her hand. Then: “Sit down for a moment and relax while I have a private chat with my son.”

  Lita Medina waited uncomfortably in the living room while Brigita led her only child into the master bedroom, where she closed the door and said, “Dinko, what the hell is this all about?”

  “She’s a girl I met through Hector Cozzo, and she has nowhere to go tonight.”

  “Hector Cozzo?” she said. “That boy was no good when times were good. He’s a bum who always got in trouble. What were you doing with Hector?”

  “He was never bad,” Dinko said. “He was just a little hustler and still is. I ran into him and did him a favor. He’s kind of an . . . agent. Still so lame he calls himself Hector the selector, and he saw this girl and got her a job in Hollywood. But it’s not working out so good.”

  “A job doing what?”

  “She’s a dancer.”

  “A dancer? What kind of dancer?”

  “In a nightclub. And she’s also a cocktail waitress.”

  “Boy, are you crazy?” his mother said. “What’s got into you?”

  “She’s basically a good girl,” Dinko said. “A lost girl. She’s trying to make enough money to send to her sick mother and little brothers in Mexico.”

  “Dinko, that’s what they all say, the kind of girls that dance in Hollywood nightclubs.”

  “You don’t know nothing about Hollywood nightclubs,” Dinko said.

 
“I know about the kind of young girls who would work in them,” Brigita said. “And how old is she, sixteen?”

  “She’s nineteen plus.”

  “So she says. She looks like a child.”

  “She’s nineteen years and four months old. She’s an adult.”

  “And you’re thirty-one going on seventeen. Behaving like you’re still in high school! Are you having sex with her?”

  “No! I barely know her. This is the second time I’ve ever even been with her. Why can’t she sleep in the spare bedroom? It hadn’t been used in . . . I don’t know how long, till Tina and Goran used it.”

  “I haven’t changed the sheets yet.”

  “She won’t care. She’s desperate and in trouble.”

  Brigita Babich took her son by the shoulders and said, “What kinda trouble? And you better tell me the truth.”

  Dinko said, “She got a job at this nightclub, thanks to Hector. And a girl that dances there has disappeared, and . . . well, she may be okay, but maybe not. The trouble is, Lita saw the guy who took her away. And the guy’s sort of a . . . bad guy.”

  Brigita Babich retreated two steps in disbelief and then came back to just inches away from Dinko and said, “That’s perfect. So you bring her here, where we can all get murdered in our sleep?”

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “We’ll probably find out tomorrow that the girl’s fine, and I’ll drive Lita back to her place in Hollywood.”

  “No!” Brigita said. “I don’t like this. I won’t have it. And aren’t you the one that’s always complaining about Mexicans taking over Pedro? You change your tune when it comes to a beautiful young one like her, don’t you?”

  It was then that he played his trump card. He used the only word that could possibly move his mother to relent. He said, “Mom, she’s a good Catholic girl in trouble. What could I do?”

  Brigita paused and looked away, bobbing her head angrily because he’d stooped to using her religion to persuade her. She said, “If she’s afraid of gangsters, she should call the police.”

  Dinko said, “She’s not exactly in this country legally. And she just needs a place to stay for one night. What would Jesus do?”

  “Don’t you Jesus me, Dinko Babich!” his mother said. “You, who never go to Mass on holy days and only go on Sunday when I drag you. Don’t you talk Jesus to me!”

  “I go to the Saturday vigil Mass lots of times that you don’t know about.”

  “You lie too easy,” she said.

  Dinko lied again: “Lita asked me if we have a church near here. She wants to go to Mary Star of the Sea tomorrow and light a candle for the missing dancer and pray for her safe return. That’s the kind of girl Lita is.”

  After a long pause, Brigita Babich said, “You have always been a con man! So all right, strip the sheets from the spare room and put them in the washer. Nobody’s gonna sleep on soiled sheets in my house.” Then she opened the door and walked down the hallway to the living room.

  Lita Medina jumped to her feet, but Brigita Babich said, “Sit down, sweetheart. Rest yourself. Are you hungry? I have some mostaccioli I can warm up for you. And we have sauerkraut, made the Croatian way, with tomato sauce.”

  * * *

  Hector Cozza finally bit the bullet, and it was a hard bite. After he’d read the entire Los Angeles Times story about the disaster at the container yard in Wilmington, his call to Kim resulted in his having to hold the cell phone away to save an eardrum.

  “Hector!” the Korean shouted. “I call you six times yesterday and today! Where you were?”

  Hector had never known the Korean to be this angry. He said, “My cell phone died on me and I didn’t even know it. I was kinda sick, too. Musta ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

  “You meet with me in one hour. The Russian bar. You be there, Hector. You listening to me?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be there,” Hector said. “Rasputin’s Retreat in one hour.”

  When he clicked off, he thought, Christ! Not that miserable place. He figured maybe he should get there early and have the surly commie bartender pour him a few ounces of vodka. He was going to need it before facing Kim. He understood vaguely that part of the calamity in the container storage yard was somehow going to blow back on him so that Kim could evade responsibility for it with Markov, or whoever the fuck was Kim’s partner on that deal.

  That was the thing about working with these people: Hector never quite knew who was totally in charge. By now, Hector was sure that neither Markov nor Kim were bucks-up businessmen. The more he nosed around and checked licenses at the establishments, the more he came to conclude that everything was leased: the property, the cars, even some of the kitchen equipment and restaurant furnishings. He’d seen a bill from a restaurant supplier that proved as much.

  He wished he could find out where they both lived. He suspected that Markov lived up on Mount Olympus, in the Hollywood Hills, because Kim had said something about coming down from the boss’s house, near where “other Russians lived.” Hector knew that there were a number of Middle Eastern and Eastern European home owners up there, some of them with holdings but some of them living on fast talk and flash money. As to Kim, well, he just figured that the big slope probably lived in Koreatown with the rest of the pig-guts-and-kimchi crowd. Kim had probably invested plenty in the latest human-trafficking venture that went very sideways, so Hector guessed he was low on bank.

  All this made him remember that the horrible Russian pervert Basil was back in town, and Hector had the phone number Ivana had given him of a dude with one foot who might turn out to be a soul brother to the Muscovite freak. If he was to lose points with Kim, maybe he could get some back with Markov. That is, if he could make Basil happy by organizing a little drinks party with the peg-leg guy and fulfill the Russian’s fantasies. He could get Ivana to be there too, or one of the other bitches that would fuck anything if the price was right, even freaks that got off on amputation.

  Well before it turned dark, 6-X-66 had started getting routine calls in east Hollywood. There was a burglary report to be taken at an old bungalow owned by a Hispanic legal secretary who worked in Century City. And a van had been stolen on Western Avenue near Fountain while a pest control specialist whose van was lettered with “Virgil the Vermin Slayer” was away from it, treating a house for dry rot.

  The exterminator’s first words to Hollywood Nate and Britney Small were “I only wish I could poison the fucking vermin that stole my truck!”

  The reports were Nate’s to write, since Britney was the driver, and afterward she drove to the station to get them signed by a supervisor.

  While they were sitting in the report room, Nate said to her, “A sure sign of aging is when a cop would rather write reports than drive. If you notice, the young hotdogs always wanna drive. None of them wanna ride shotgun and keep books.”

  “I guess I must be aging,” Britney said. “I don’t mind writing reports at all. In fact, I kinda like it. I always got A’s in English.”

  Nate smiled at his young partner. “Sure, Britney, you’re aging. In about five years you might actually be able to walk into a club on the Sunset Strip and buy a drink without getting carded. How old’re you, twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-four,” she said. Then she grinned and added, “I’m getting to be an OG, too.”

  None of the Old Guys ever complained about being assigned with petite Britney Small, by virtue of her proven bravery and the street cred she’d earned in last year’s gunfight. In the two years she’d been at Hollywood Division, she’d made a name for herself as a calm and reliable partner with a quiet sense of humor who always had your back.

  Nate said, “Please tell me that you don’t see a thirty-nine-year-old hunk like me as an OG. I’m an actor, and the aging process makes actors irrelevant. Tell me you’re kidding or I’ll kill myself in the parking lot before my fortieth birthday.”

  “Okay, I’m kidding,” Britney said. “You’ll never be an OG. And you really a
re a hunk. All the women in the locker room talk about Hollywood Nate and how you’re so ripped from all the working out, and how they’d die to have your gorgeous wavy hair—”

  “Which is getting very gray on the sides, if you’ll notice.”

  “Which only makes you sexier. And I think that one of these days you’re gonna get a call from your agent—”

  “I fired the worthless bastard.”

  “Or a call from somebody in show business about a big movie where they need a handsome copper type, and it’ll be you that gets the gig.”

  Nate took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and said, “Young Britney, you just earned yourself a soda. Get us both one, and make mine diet.”

  It was 9:15 p.m. by the time Hector Cozzo got to Rasputin’s Retreat. The small parking lot was jammed, so he parked his red Mercedes SL on the boulevard, making sure there was plenty of room fore and aft of his bumpers, since those fucking old Russkie drunk drivers would be coming and going all evening. When he got inside he couldn’t find a place to sit except at the end of the bar.

  It took several minutes for the burly Russian bartender to saunter down to him and raise his chin an inch or two by way of recognition.

  “Has Mr. Kim come in yet?” Hector asked.

  “No,” the bartender said.

  “Gimme a vodka,” Hector said. “Better make it a double.”

  “Russian or shit vodka?” the bartender mumbled.

  “Russian, of course,” Hector said, with a smarmy smile that brought a scowl from the bartender. Hector thought he’d better watch the big asshole to make sure he didn’t spit in the glass.

  Hector finished that one and was about to order another when he saw Kim enter. Hector watched the Korean go straight to the back office and he knew that the slope had a key to every door in every building Markov leased. As Hector was walking through the dark and increasingly noisy barroom, he saw two men in Members Only jackets sitting at a small table near the door. One of them looked to him like the Armenian who’d stopped him outside Shanghai Massage to inform him that only Armenians should be operating massage parlors in or near Little Armenia.